Sarah Kanning

So. The bad news is that the second act is a mess, and my first reader alerted me to the fact that my story actually starts with a scene well into the first act. Last night at writers’ group was the first time I’d touched the manuscript in more than a week because I’d been [...]

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Here’s a great place to start: 50 Strategies For Making Yourself Work, courtesy of Jerry Oltion and the folks at SFWA.
I appreciated this list because, like the author, I find that any productivity strategy that works for me does not work forever — the work-avoidance part of my brain is far too clever for that.

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I’ve been thinking about On Writing, Stephen King’s memoir/writing treatise a lot in the last two days, because Monday morning I awoke to some medium-to-severe back pain. A trip to a massage therapist didn’t help, and it felt even worse today. Grrr. In general, I lead a largely pain-free existence, and on days like these [...]

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Skipping the writer’s bookshelf for the moment to plug an online tool I use all the time: WorldCat (www.worldcat.org). No, it doesn’t have anything to do with cats, unfortunately — the “cat” is short for catalog, and it’s (among other things) an aggregator of  information from libraries all over the world about their holdings.
If you [...]

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This week, I’m recommending a book to all those tired and bedraggled writers who are now more than two-thirds of the way through National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo). If you need balm for your weary souls, this is it: If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland. This book was first published in 1938, [...]

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